Margaret Thatcher’s Infamous Soviet Interview

Margaret Thatcher (center) is pictured in a screenshot from a combative but uncensored interview with Soviet Union state television 1987. (BBC)

Margaret Thatcher’s funeral is Wednesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

In the same way that the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev became wildly popular in the West, Margaret Thatcher was very much the pin-up politician of the East.

Even in the USSR, a country she had once described as bent on world dominance, there were many who admired Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’.

In 1987, Thatcher was given a rare opportunity to appear on Soviet television – and, as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg recalls, the interview Thatcher gave sent shock waves through the Soviet Union.